Archive

Recently, I was writing some ads for a power company. Night was falling heavily. Dusk was reflecting right off my watch chain and telling me that a big migraine attack is pending. My brain was probably sucking up to the walls of the cranium. The cranial joints were probably giving away, and all the madness of the day like cold angry air was wrapping up like velvet heavy blankets and falling to deep lowers of my body, to my feet, which were becoming exceptionally heavy to lift.

And yet around me, white papers swirled around, each jostling for space, trying to make sense at and with each other. Some floated and blobbed, scattered and screeched – energy, light, carbon credits, bio-fuels, power. And then maybe, I had fallen asleep a little on that word..power.

And then, in my own quizzical way, which I often do to escape the audacity of the world and events, I picked up that word, like a mother picking up a baby sent downstream on a bulrush basket, and weaved a dream, or a reality around it.

You see, Power is one of those funny things that assumes importance due to its intangibility. The quality of having it is equal to not having it in the material sense. It is not eating the sundea. And yet, its palpable pressure is denied by noone.

One of the things I have come to heed about power is that everyone is searching for it, in all their capacity. I had this one phase where the search of power in the inanimate interested me greatly, because I believe they do, too. Everywhere, in all denominations of life and non-life, there is a craving to be powerful.

What is it actually? Terms like these are irritatingly irreplaceable, since they have been nailed down to name a virtue in absolute exactitude. It comes to mind that power may be expanded to the feeling of having an importance or control over something or somebody.

Zoom in from the galaxies to the family of a patriarchal leper husband beating up the wife. Everywhere an invisible sceptre is passed along. Like a truce since pre-Bing Bang, pre-everything that came to be!

Defeat thus, must the feeling of powerlessness. The feeling of having to let the sceptre slip from your hands unwillingly. But the will here is the magic word. This sceptre if handed over willingly transforms to the sceptre of defeat, or mellower, of compassion and kindness.